Miss Love-Letters always sported a pink sweatsuit that was two sizes too small. Thin cotton sweatpants and a zip up hoodie of the same material, bubble-gum pink. Her ass rounded out by said strangling bubble-yum pink chewed up in color over time, so big it always looked like she was leaning forward when she walked—an LSD pink fat cat. She was what you would call thiccc these days with three c’s, but you can’t say shit like that about a fourteen-year-old. She reminded us of a fat cat also in that there was a certain suave about her, always appearing and disappearing in inappropriate places without sound, with a smile like a bad omen we learned to find icky all too quickly.
When I say she was always in that pink sweatsuit, she was always in that pink sweat suit. At least on all the school days, the days she came to school and hovered around us, present like a mosquito, just out of reach like a shadow. A shadow of a mosquito. At least for the summer that we were there. In that part of China, during that time, which was not as long ago as I just made it sound like, people showered once a week and wore the same clothes all the time. Near the deserts, the summer night gets cold, so the sweatsuit is a common attire in July. My point is, even in the dirt and dust of the deserts, Miss Love-Letters always kept her cotton-candy-bubble-yum-TUMS sweatsuit just a little bit cleaner than the dirty jackets and jeans in which the other kids surfed the yellow earth and sand. Another way she was like a pink fat cat, self-cleaning. A bit surreal and absurd if you can even visualize such a thing.
How she got her name was because of all the love letters, obviously.
The other kids would leave us gifts also. Obscure knock-off-brand snacks (think Prongles as opposed to Pringles), plastic finger toys, stickers bearing chemical iridescence, small fireworks, and such—things not good enough to be our bittersweet childhood memorabilia, and contraband on school properties. And they would leave us their QQ numbers on a little piece of paper, wishing that them and us would be connected forever and ever. (QQ is essentially the Chinese MSN Messenger.) But Miss. Love-Letters, she had more to offer.
All the boy volunteer teachers would chance upon folded up pieces of colorful paper tucked in our notebooks or laptops (always Pikachu yellow or Viagra blue, never nothing moderne like the Macbook Space Grey, or chic like a Burberry Beige, you know?), or they would just lie right there on our chairs, in the empty classroom that we took for use as our office for the summer. She would talk about the parts of our faces that she preferred in the folded pieces of paper. She would talk about her day containing names and references absent from our indexes of self-importance and draw lots of hearts. She would discuss the day our bus arrived like many tons of unsorted cable, long enough to lead her out of the desert, and the way we stepped off, a whole new species!, and her first impressions of us and our obnubilated faces (her own words, but obviously found with understandable pretense feigning intelligence in a way-old dictionary caked with dust) and how that made her heart thumpity-bum-bum. (Also her own words.) And when we looked up after reading the folded pieces of paper, uncertain how we were supposed to feel or what to think, we would spot her round head, squinting eyes poking out from a corner of the window. And she would see that we saw her and turn around and squirm away, her big round ass swaying side to side with every step, like a pink fat cat, giggling.
And the girl volunteers all received letters from her also. Except, being from that part of China, Miss Love-Letters did not have the vocabulary to comment on the clothes or make-up or rings and earrings of the city-girls-of-us. The brand names alone would be in such phonetics that her ear muscles never experienced, waves so exotic she went wild with dreams of the world outside at night, chewing the edge of her blanket, not being able to sleep. Even in those moments of torturous consternation, when both desire and reality were simultaneously so present in the small round mound of her head, yet farther apart than the distance between heaven and hell, even then the destination she could hardly conjure would still be miles and miles off from the luxury of the brands the girls-of-us wore. So instead, she asked if the girls-of-us had boyfriends or crushes, toes crossed in her dust-cake Chinese rice-field espadrilles as she penned these notes, wishing for one single glimmer of empathy for her forlorn one-sided yearning of a different kind of boy, a different kind of life, even just in a hidden smile in her general direction that she never got.
The problem was, when you are sixteen, seventeen, eighteen, there is nothing worse than an unwanted crush, unsolicited adoration. The problem was the volunteers—the us, the city boys and girls on our summer breaks from boarding schools in the US and the Commonwealth, the Ivy-League hopefuls, here, volunteer-teaching, yet another line onto our resumes—we did not know how to handle the little pieces of folded awkward affection, frankly awful attempts at equal conversation, from something so pink, so beneath us, something with so much dirt under her fingernails.
So, we sneered and jeered behind the pink fat cat’s back. We walked around her on the dirt paths in school between the brick and clay walls. Antisocial distancing. Boys and girls alike, all of us, we all did it. We quarantined her as if she was a walking blob of mucus, something contagious.
No, worse. Unimportant. As if she was something unimportant. Which she was.
And we the critical thinkers! The cynics. The overachievers!
We made a documentary!
To examine the reality of China’s rural education and have an honest introspection of the act of volunteer-teaching itself. Is it a valuable effort for the kids, for the community? Or is it really a pat on our own backs. A “good job!,” “well done!” Another line in our resumes? Another experience to write about in our college essays?
Meta, right? Oooh-weee! How sharp were the questions we threw out there in our film. Very self-aware. A new-generation, anti-establishment, question everything attitude. Full of attitude.
In his smoky office, nibbling on his cigarettes between his yellow teeth, behind his misty dirty glasses, the principal told our camera that with the little financial support from the government, the kids here just can’t compete with the city kids, and college is four years of negative profit as opposed to hands in the fields.
In the classrooms, eating the same lunch as the students, the local teachers told our camera how they still had to tend to their crops at home because a teacher’s salary was not enough to support a family.
In the dimly lit farm sheds of the student’s homes, the chicken and geese bawk-bawk’ed at our camera and became our B-rolls.
Students, from grade one to grade seven, sat at the top of the yellow slide in the tiny playground built on malnourished jaundiced earth at the back of the school and stared into our cameras as our cameras stared back into them.
We did not care about what they said, only the product.
The framing, the lighting, the sound.
Because it was just another line on our resumes, a better line than all the other stupid sixteen, seventeen, eighteen-year-olds who went out and volunteered that summer but didn’t make a documentary out of it.
That day, only after we wrapped up our interviews with the sixth graders did we see the pink fat cat, Miss Love-Letters, hovering in the corners of our eyes and watching our every move. She pulled her classmates that had just finished the interviews aside—at barely five feet, she was much stronger than all the other sixth graders because she had repeated years a few times and because her family owned the little convenience store at the end of the only paved, asphalt road in town, so she had always had her snacks—and she forced those poor little boys and girls to tell her what happened even though the whole time she stared at the camera, she stared at us, she was right outside everything that happened.
When we took apart the tripod, Miss Love-Letters, the pink fat cat, danced her way toward us, hands behind her back, with a signature Chinese TV novella female antagonist smile-non-smile under her small squinting eyes, as if she were the protagonist here, as if this was about her.
“What’s that?”
“That’s a tri-pod.”
“What does it do?”
“The camera sits on top of it, so it’s steady.”
“What’s that?”
“That’s the microphone.”
“Why is it fluffy?”
So we only capture the sounds of our subject, not the sounds of the wind and the environment.”
“What are you doing with the camera?”
“…”
“Are you making a movie?”
“Ok, fine! You can be in the interview, too! God!”
A victorious ear-to-ear smile emerged on the pink fat cat’s face. With silent feet-steps, she pranced with jolly to the top of the yellow slide before we even told her to.
Shaking our damn heads in our hearts, we set up the tripod again and took off the lens cover.
And this was supposed to be it, the minor nuisance in any successful experience. You put up with it and you laugh later. And you say things like, “Ahhh, that pink fat cat! She was funny indeed.”
And that was supposed to be that.
Until our second to last day at the school, when bags were packed and we all couldn’t wait for our hot showers, clean clothes, soft beds, and getting out of this shithole, Miss Love-Letters’ final delivery came. Of course, we all got ours. Along with the letters, some of which still spelled our names wrong, were candies and little white wildflowers picked from the barren earth.
But one of us, the boy the pink fat cat fancied the most, the young, pale, tidy, virgin city boy who taught music lessons to the kids with his guitar and sad songs, when that one of us opened the folded piece of love, out slipped a knock-off brand condom (think Duress as opposed to Durex) and a few kernels of corn.
“9pm tonight. If you know where to find me.”
Our office bubbled like a boiling pot of dumplings. Everybody woo-ing and ahh-ing and whistling, twirling, and jumping. The one of us that Miss Love-Letters fancied just stood there and blushed, the red overcoming his pale white dumpling skin.
We the Ivy-League hopefuls, of course we solved Miss. Love-Letters’ little riddle in no time. It’s the corn field behind the school. And the condom, well, it wasn’t going to be a one-on-one water balloon fight, was it?
“Of course, you have to go, you little grown man!”
We egged the virgin one of us on.
“If this isn’t the most romantic thing ever!”
“Gotta get a taste of the local cuisines!”
The virgin one of us was flustered, not sure what to do. But when you are sixteen and a virgin, when you are a boy, a round full-body pink bubble-yum ass is a round full-body pink bubble-yum ass is a round full-body pink bubble-yum ass. It almost does not matter how much dirt there was under her fingernails.
After dinner, we went to the convenience store at the end of the road. We bought a beer and a Red Bull for the virgin one of us and put the cash in Mrs. Love-Letters’ hand and gave a big smile to Mr. Love-Letters and said thank you. They said it’s our last day. The drinks were on them. We said, “No, we insist.”
Back in our office, we said to the virgin one of us,
“Chug my friend! Let the beer bubbles balloon up your other end!”
We said,
“Red Bull gives you wings!”
We said,
“Be twenty minutes late. Desperate animals do desperate things.”
We said,
“Bring the guitar. The corn field is big and dark. Serenade the pink fat cat with that sweet noise you make. She will seek you like the north star.”
We said,
“Break a leg my friend! And break her back!”
And only then, the virgin one of us, the pale dumpling-skin boy, high on Redbull, shitty beer, and life, disappeared into the dark outside the office, already late for his appointment.
The rest of us gave the virgin one of us a song’s time’s lead and we collected all the fireworks and we followed to the corn field, the dark night our armor cloaking our crusade for cherry-pop incognito.
The moon hid behind the clouds, unwilling to bear witness. The corn field a vast web of that which threads nightmares. We stood in a straight line on the dirt road overseeing before God let there be light. A sad guitar sang somewhere in it.
Just when we started to wonder if the pink fat cat was actually there, if she had panicked and bailed or waited too long and already left, the sad singing of the guitar choked itself into stop. A muffled ruffle. As if a pink fat cat’s caught her prey.
Siuuu!
The first rocket went up and exploded above the corn field. Red and orange and green, lighting up the top of the stalks. We spoke to the darkness, in English,
“Follow the colors, young dumpling! Let the light illuminate your path!”
Siuuu! Siuuu! Siuuu!
All the rockets went up and the dogs and chickens and geese made butcher house noises afar in the village, scared for their lives.
In English, we spoke to the darkness,
“Young one, be not afraid! Let your brothers and sisters be your eyes. See clearly! But know there is NO wrong hole!”
“AHAHAHA HAHAHA HAHA HAHA HA HA HA HA!”
I fucking hate us.
The next day, we took the bus to the nearest city in that part of China and the day after that we took the planes and got back to our respective cities, to comfort, to family, to parents’ expectations, to an Ivy-hopeful future.
One of us sent in our group chat a link a couple months later. It was Miss Love-Letters’ QQ Space (Chinese MySpace), except now, we should call her Mrs. Love-Letters.
The pink fat cat got married. Her most recent post was a picture of her in a white dress in a white veil, standing next to some older man. We couldn’t see her round face or squinting eyes under the veil, but her hips were as wide and round as ever.
From the comment sections and the QQ chats with other students, we gathered that this older man is from a powerful family in the village. Miss Love-Letters’ family owed them money. It was unclear if they actually loved each other, or if she was forced into being a wife as a payment for debt. It was also suspected that the hasty wedding was because of an unexpected pregnancy.
The pink fat cat had always been fat. It was hard to tell from the photo.
If you ask me, I hope that she poked a hole in that condom in the love letter to the singing virgin she fancied. I hope that baby that might or might not have been has pale dumpling skin, because in a few weeks when we flew back to our boarding schools, we forgot about her.
In our documentary footage, there sat Miss Love-Letters, the pink fat cat in her bubble-yum pink sweatsuit, at the top of the yellow slide, smiling her Chinese TV novella female antagonist’s smile-non-smile.
“What do the volunteer teachers bring to your life?” we asked her.
Smiling, she said,
“Nothing at all.”
